Whistler will be hopping during ski fest

Gary Kingston, Vancouver Sun03.15.2013

Olympic medal contender Devon Kershaw of Canada, shown in action at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships last month in Val di Fiemme, Italy, will be among the athletes in the Callaghan Valley for the Sea to Sky Nordic Festival.Mike Hewitt
/ Getty Images

Alexandra Pretorius of Calgary competes in women’s ski Jumping at the world skiing championships last month in Val di Fiemme, Italy. Pretorius’s jumping improved considerably after a week of training and competition at Whistler.Mike Hewitt
/ Getty Images

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From long-distance flyers to dead-eye shooters to aerobically fit athletes pushing the limit of human endurance, Whistler Olympic Park will see all that Nordic skiing has to offer over the next 16 days.

Oh yeah, and a giant, eight-foot skiing rabbit by the name of Klister.

The Sea to Sky Nordic Festival in the Callaghan Valley marks the first time that Canadian championships in cross-country skiing, biathlon, ski jumping and Nordic combined are being contested at the same venue during the same period.

“It’s an idea that has been explored over several years,” said Davin McIntosh, executive director of Cross Country Canada. “This time, we got together with biathlon and the other sports early enough to make it feasible.

“We all managed to get our programs aligned. It’s an exciting prospect for us, to see how it works and how it affects attendance.

“One thing that’s nice about the Callaghan and the Whistler Olympic Park venue is that it has tremendous capacity for event hosting.”

The championships are expected to attract some 900 athletes — 300 more than were in the Callaghan during the 2010 Winter Olympics — plus a over-sized furry mascot on skinny skis.

It’s a measure of the growth of cross-country skiing in general and the rise in the sport’s profile, thanks to world championship gold from the sprint team of Devon Kershaw and Alex Harvey and multiple World Cup podiums from the men’s squad, that Cross Country Canada has introduced Klister to the scene this year. The CCC is the only Olympic winter sport organization in the country with a mascot.

“It’s an idea we batted around with staff internally,” said Matthew Jeffries, CCC’s director of business development. “Given the fact skill development programs are such a big part of what we do — we’ve got 12,000 kids in the jackrabbit program across the country — we thought it would be a good way to go around and reach out to kids in these programs and bring the character to life.”

“There are so many applications where it could add value and create excitement and fun for the marketing experience. It started out as a bit of a joke, but there’s a lot of rationale to it.”

The fun part at WOP comes March 30 when, immediately after the long-distance races at the cross-country nationals, Klister and Yeti, a mascot for the Canadian snowshoe racing series, will stage a one-kilometre race inside the stadium area for what Jeffries calls “mascot bragging rights and eternal glory.”

The Nordic festival will also provide a great opportunity for the CCC to promote its rapidly growing e-store, an online business selling licensed merchandise.

“We’ve had an online store for five or six years, but we’ve really started to put more and more focus on it and we’re getting a lot of traction,” Jeffries said.

“We’re building a much larger inventory and having more of a presence at events throughout Canada. Sales at the World Cups in Canmore and Quebec City were really good.”

The festival has been a huge undertaking for event organizers, with each sport having an event chair drawn from one of the Nordic clubs in the Sea to Sky corridor.

Athletes, including several from the U.S., coaches, officials and volunteers are being housed in accommodation stretching from Squamish to Pemberton.

“The work that goes into this, people have no idea,” said Sherryl Yeager, event chair for the cross-country nationals. “We’ve been working on this year, trying to line up sponsors, applying for (government hosting) grants, developing a logo, lining up volunteers.”

Yeager said she and the other event chairs hope the festival will help draw more people into the Callaghan. There is no charge to attend any of the competitions.

“We’re finding there are people who still don’t know that Whistler Olympic Park is there and open to the public. You say ‘cross-country skiing in Whistler’ and people go ‘Lost Lake?’

“We’re really hoping this raises the profile of the park. It’s a world-class facility that’s one of the real legacies of the Olympics. There are beautiful recreational trails and we want people to come up and realize the venue is there.”

With the 2014 cross-country nationals headed to Newfoundland, the festival concept is unlikely to be repeated at the Callaghan for at least a couple of years. McIntosh said this year’s event will be a good test to determine public interest and if there can be any kind of cost savings to the sport organizations.

National team athletes in all the sports will be in the Callaghan, including 2014 Olympic medal contenders such as Kershaw, Len Valjas and Ivan Babikov from cross-country skiing and 2014 Paralympic medal contenders Brian McKeever and Mark Arendz.

The North American and Canadian biathlon championships run from Saturday through Wednesday. The Haywood cross-country nationals go March 23-30 and the Aviva ski jump and Nordic combined nationals from March 28-30.

And while it’s not formally part of the festival, the Canadian alpine championships are being held at Whistler Mountain from March 21-27.

“From a B.C. athletes perspective, this (festival) allows them to participate in a high-level event in their own province and, in many cases, their home facility,” said John Heilig, the Nordic sport manager for WOP.

He said the concept of a having all four Nordic championships contested at the same venue was put forward by Own the Podium, the organization that helps prioritize and determine investment strategies for Canadian sport federations.

“They’re based in Calgary, so it’s kind of a coup for this to be happening here,” said Heilig. “It points to the relevance of this area as a training region and competition region.”

In fact, the cross-country community’s long-term goal is to secure a World Cup event for WOP, likely in 2018. While the cross-country trails and biathlon shooting range get significant use during the winter season, the ski jump hills haven’t been used since last year’s Canadian championships.

However, Ski Jumping Canada, which is hoping for a breakthrough at Sochi from one of its young female jumpers, is planning to have a fall training camp at WOP in November to get ready for next season then, perhaps, have another camp shortly before the Olympics.

“We need to train as much as we can on that facility because it’s very similar to (the jumps at) Sochi,” says Brent Morrice, chairman of Ski Jumping Canada. “The more jumps there, the better off we are.”

He noted that Alexandra Pretorius, a 17-year-old from Calgary who won a Grand Prix event in France last summer and who was 15th at a World Cup in Sochi in December, saw her jumping improve considerably after a week of training and competition at WOP last March.

“All of a sudden, she was cracking jumps. We’re hoping that happens again. Everything we’re doing now is geared around getting results at the Olympics.”

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